[pmwiki-users] PmWiki forum...

[Patrick R. Michaud]

> > 5) The idea a wiki is better than a forum is also nonsense.  [...]
> 
> Strong words there!  I dare you to justify this bald assertion.
> You say that we haven't proven that the mailing list is good, well, you
> haven't proven in any way that a forum is good.

Indeed, Dan has made some strong assertions here (many of which
I also find unsupported).  However, I must also say that I
briefly visited the sample forum Dan put together at
http://www.fast.st/pmwiki/index.php, and based on Dan's work
there I think I finally see an answer to the whole problem...which I'll
describe below.

First I need to acknowledge a quick "Thank you!" to Dan
for the time he put into the beta PmWiki forum.  Although I
don't think I'll use the ZAPforum approach that he's prototyped,
seeing it in action did finally cause me to see a path through 
this mess.  So Dan gets a lot of credit for pushing hard
enough to get us to a solution on this.  

> In all cases, the difficulty is in taxonomy and grouping pages/threads
> in a way that makes the right page/thread easy to find.

Kathryn has it exactly right here.

When I first visited Dan's PmWiki forum site, the first thing I 
noticed was that the front page didn't have any immediate clues 
about how to navigate to find questions or answers to questions.  
Then I noticed the "topics" list in the in the sidebar, with 
things like Administration, Beginners, Bugs, Developers, etc.
My thought was... "Oh, okay.  That could work."

Clicking one of the topics goes to a "topic" page that then displays
the questions that have been asked with that topic.  "Okay, that 
works nicely for navigation, too."

So, as Kathryn says, the key to solving this problem (and
the difficult part) is to have a reasonable set of topics 
with which to organize the questions, answers and commentary.

Dan's topic list is a reasonable start.  But there's more...

My next (fallacious) thought in playing with Dan's site was something 
along the lines of "Too bad we can't easily put a topic list like 
this in the sidebar on pmwiki.org... the sidebar on pmwiki.org really 
needs to keep a structure like it has now."  I then played with the 
forum some more, found a few more things I liked and disliked about 
it, and figured I'd just file the experience away for a while until 
an answer presented itself.

But a few minutes later the answers came like lightning:

1.  Oops!  We **can** have a sidebar on pmwiki.org with topics
    like those on Dan's forum site!  Just because the main sidebar
    on pmwiki.org needs a certain structure doesn't mean the
    Cookbook needs to have that same structure also.  The Cookbook 
    group can (and should) have its own specialized sidebar, with 
    topics organizing the recipes.  The recipes then handle the
    load of presenting questions and answers.

2.  ...and the Cookbook needs organization anyway, and a topic list
    in the sidebar is a really good organizating framework for doing that.
    Each topic goes to a "topic page" that displays the recipes
    associated with that topic.

3.  This solves the problem of the unwieldy Cookbook home page,
    because it simply becomes an index to the available topics
    (which are also available via the sidebar links).

4.  The main problem then becomes keeping the topic pages up to
    date.  But we already have an excellent mechanism for this...
    Categories!  Each recipe simply identifies the category or
    categories (topics) it's associated with, and a topic page
    is simply a pagelist of all the recipes with that given
    category.

5.  And this resolves the speed problem I was encountering with
    my Cookbook.Cookbook-ByCategory experiment -- instead of
    trying to get a listing of all recipes into a single categorized
    page (slow), we let the individual topic pages handle it.  We 
    can also have an "All Recipes topic" that simply displays a list 
    of all of the cookbook recipes and their descriptions.

6.  Since many of the recipe pages already have a "Questions answered
    by this recipe" section, a little bit of structure added to
    those sections would make it possible to use a pagelist to
    show the questions answered by the recipes within each topic.
    This makes it look more like a FAQ type of document.

7.  We then return to my earlier idea to have a form that makes it
    easy for people to post questions as new pages in the cookbook.
    The form would appear on the various topic pages, and would
    automatically create a new page containing the question, as well
    as the associated topic tag and an [[!AnswerMe]] tag that 
    indicates the question needs an answer.  The [[!AnswerMe]]
    tag makes it easy to locate any questions that haven't
    ben resolved (for those of us who like to do such things).

8.  When we think that a question has finally been adequately
    resolved, we remove the [[!AnswerMe]] tag and adjust any
    other tags in the page as appropriate.  The question page
    has ultimately become a "question+answer" recipe...

This solves a *lot* of problems at once... 

- It solves the speed problem of the Cookbook.Cookbook-ByCategory 
  page, because each topic area can be handled with just one or 
  two pagelist directives... unlike Cookbook-ByCategory which
  has a lot of separate pagelist directives and takes too long
  to render.

- The Cookbook becomes the single repository for any information
  and tips that don't quite fit into the core documentation.  It
  returns cookbook to it's original purpose of being the place
  to provide a variety of answers about PmWiki configuration,
  and not just a place for recipes.

- It gives us a way to quickly organize and reorganize questions
  and topics as needed into more appropriate structures.

- Unanswered questions are easy to locate, and they quickly become
  "answer recipes" that document how to solve a given problem
  for whoever comes by later with a similar question.

- Background discussion and commentary for each answer recipe
  can be easily stored in an associated '-Talk' page for the
  recipe.

I like it.  I like it a lot.  Based on this I will probably start 
re-organizing the Cookbook and the PmWiki.Questions page along 
these lines over the next couple of days.  Once I get the basic
structures in place, others can of course help with refactoring
and migrating information and recipes to where they belong.

Thanks to all who participated in this discussion, it has
been extremely valuable and helpful.

Pm